You hear it left and right … do not start in TIER-1 GEO’s straight away, learn the basics in developing countries first. But why is that? Or is it true at all? I will summarize the reasons in this article and try to explain why it is so and whether it’s a rule to follow in 100% of cases.

Note: This is a repost from the STM Forum, where I posted the article originally, in November last year. I decided to repost my own articles from STM from time to time, so guys who don’t have membership over there, can benefit from it too.

LET’S DEFINE WHAT TIERS MEAN FIRST.

When talking about GEOs, we often use the so called “TIERS” to define what countries we actually have in mind. 3 tiers are used most of the time : Tier 1 are considered the most competitive, Tier 3 are the least competitive ones.

There is no definitive list of countries per Tier or a fixed set of rules that would define them unfortunately. On top of that, several industries or agencies have their own rules for this. So we gotta come up with our own definition, in relation to internet marketing and affiliate offers.

Basically, the longer it is possible to monetize a certain GEO with online offers, the higher Tier such country belongs to, in terms of affiliate marketing. This is closely tied to the available payment options and the wealth of particular countries.

HOW MANY TIERS DO WE HAVE?

Not so long ago, the only way to pay for something on the internet, was to use a Credit Card. As you can guess, only a limited amount of GEOs were developed enough for this : USA, Canada, founding EU members, The Nordics, Australia, Switzerland … the most developed Asian countries like Japan etc … These were the original TIER 1 Geos.